


And rued the thirteen clocks that would not say

by middlemarch



Series: Shadow Season 2 [5]
Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, American Civil War, Angst, Apologies, Art, Artists, Doctors & Physicians, Drinking & Talking, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Mother-Son Relationship, Season 2, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-26 20:38:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 12,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9921281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: "Why else would God take me from myself?"





	1. “…the new testament of Plymouth Bay”

Mary had pieced the quilt on the bed herself, with scraps Gustav had brought home from the mill. She didn’t care for needlework very much but she had designed the pattern, an elaboration of grandmother’s garden which had required painstaking measurements and several discarded templates before she was satisfied; it had taken hours to cut the hexagons and she had had to commandeer their dining room table for a week to assemble it. Gustav had smiled at her as they ate their meals in the parlor and warned her not to strain her eyes overmuch. Sewing the pieces, some drab, some brilliantly colored, the experimental mordant more successful, had allowed her mind an unexpected access to Euclid and she had taken to keeping her mathematics notes on a low table on her right side so she might jot down some equation or question as it emerged from the angles dancing in behind her eyes. She had given it to Caroline for Christmas, her sister’s astonished response a better gift than any of the gaily wrapped presents she’d received. Waking to find it under her hands again had been evidence of Caroline’s endless thoughtfulness, reminding her where she was and who loved her.

She hardly recalled the trip from Washington City. She had written letters, to Jedediah and Samuel, a brief missive to Miss Dix tendering her resignation and thanking her, and then she had had little strength left to leave her bed. Mrs. Garland and Aunt Agnes had had a hushed and tense tete-a-tete but the visions had returned and Mary strained to make out the hymn her mother sang and did not listen to the other women. There had been soot and the terrible noise of the train departing and then a sick darkness from which she had not been able to awaken fully until she saw her hands on the mosaic quilt, where the indigo was set off by the palest yellow, the greens mimicking leaves. The room was dim but a woman sat beside her and she was relieved and yet worried when she made out Caro’s face, the smooth wings of her pale brown hair precise against her round cheeks, her forefinger marking her page in the book she held.

“Shouldn’t be here, not safe,” Mary murmured, her voice weak and low. She could not hear them, but the little boys were certain to be playing downstairs, all except little Taddy asleep in his crib if she read the angle of light correctly. He’d been a newborn when she left Boston and Caroline had known what it cost her to stroke his full cheek when her own son had looked so much the same but had not lived. She should not be in this house, risking the health of those she held dear with exposure to her fever; she had thought she was to go with Aunt Agnes to Manchester after a brief stop in Boston but she sensed she’d been in her sister’s home for several days and could not see how she could leave. Even to sit up in the comfortable bed was arduous.

“It’s safe enough, May,” Caroline said calmly. Mary heard the concern in her sister’s voice and tried again.

“Why didn’t Aunt take me to Manchester…as we’d planned? The children, it’s not fair to have me here,” she asked, striving to sound stronger, wincing at her failure and the awakening pain in her hips and back, that had made her understand the belief in demons.

“You would have died. You don’t know—you collapsed on the train, it was all Aunt Agnes could do to get you here… she had to ask help from strangers and they all thought you might not survive the carriage ride,” Caroline explained with some asperity, her familiar lack of any softening elaboration a comfort. “That first night, we called Mr. Rivers with Dr. Jennings. I feared we would lose you and that you would not even know you had come home.”

“Oh,” Mary said. She could not think of what else to say. She would not have welcomed death but her future seemed indistinct. Would Jedediah listen to her and stay away? Would he come? If he did, would it be a doctor, friend, or lover? Without her work, without him, who was she? The questions exhausted her.

“Will you take a little broth? You need nourishment with your medicine, so you will recover your strength the doctors say,” Caroline said.

“I’ll try, I haven’t much appetite,” Mary replied. “I’m nothing but tired though I’ve done nothing but sleep.” She felt the fatigue of the illness within her flesh, slowing her thoughts. The flowers in the quilted garden seemed to wave in a gentle breeze across her lap, the primroses in the corner, the crinolined peonies at her knees.

“Does he know? The man you cry out for in the night, does he know how you feel?” her sister said. They had always been this way, able to ask any question even if the other would not answer, recognizing sometimes the question must be asked before it could be answered. Caro would not hesitate to inquire and she would understand what Mary felt from the cadence of her voice, the way it broke, even if her response was oblique or abridged, if she said nothing at all.

“Caro…” she sighed. “It’s not as simple as that.”

“I thought you would call for Gustav—and you do. And for the baby and Mama. But not as often as for him, for this Jedediah. You met him there, I suppose?” There was no reason to avoid the truth with her sister. She would judge but kindly and they were sisters, knowing each other in ways no other could.

“Yes. I did. He is still there, he must stay,” Mary said.

“He must? Or he won’t leave? After letting you go, desperately, grievously ill?” Caro replied, her anger evident but unjustified.

“He has his duty, Caro, and I told him, I told him not to come,” she said.

“And he listened to you? Out of your head with fever and you are giving him orders? Yet he has sent—oh, what sort of man is he?” her sister exclaimed. Had she sounded like that to Jedediah when she arrived at Mansion House? Utterly convinced she had the right of it, throwing over her plan to be observant and deliberate in the face of the chaos that controlled the hospital.

“The best kind. He is a doctor, the finest one they have. He treated me—and he did not want me to go. He fought,” she said, coughing, sipping the water her sister handed her. “The hospital’s chief is the one…who made me go. There was no other way, there was nothing Jedediah could do. Don’t blame him… he tried, he promised to come.”

“That’s enough, May. Don’t trouble yourself. I shouldn’t have pressed you. I don’t think you will remember, but Dr. Jennings has not been here since that first night. A Dr. Harris arrived the next morning, bearing a telegram in lieu of a letter of introduction, sent by your Jedediah, Dr. Foster. He has offered his services as instructed by your friend and he is far superior to any physician we would have consulted for you, more prompt and attentive as well. If you say Jedediah Foster is a good man, he is, if you say he cannot do more, you must be right. I’ll have the maid bring you some broth and then you must sleep again.” Caroline rose and started to leave the room.

“Wash your hands and change your apron. Before you see the boys,” Mary cried. Caroline nodded and left. She had been right; Mary could not recall any medical care since she had left Washington City but it seemed the man Jedediah had sent in his place may have saved her life. She thought she would be more alert for his next visit and it would be a queer consolation to meet the physician who was proxy and colleague and friend to Jed. She wondered what he would be like and what she would learn, what Jed intended and what he could not imagine she would, like Ruth, glean from his leavings.


	2. “…you could be an inspiration to the others”

They had called it surgery, what they’d done to the man, they’d called it saving his life and Jed Foster thought he’d never heard such arrant lies from another physician. Even Hale at his worst couldn’t have stood back from flesh so poorly cleaned and stitched and considered it a passable job. The man breathed and had managed to retain the wit to speak, if not to know himself, and now Jed must undo all that had been done and give him some chance to regain his soul. Henry Hopkins could say he hadn’t lost it but what did it mean without identity? Even a newborn baby had some sense of who he belonged to, the beginning of relationship to other and thus self, before God mattered a whit. Mary would say the baby mattered to God even if God did not concern the baby, she would argue the point about the nature of the soul and where it was seated, as she dripped chloroform onto the cloth, but she was not assisting him. Emma Green stood across in a dress he thought she once would have pouted to have worn, handing him the instruments too slowly. She was abstracted today, he thought glancingly, though perhaps it was only that she was not Mary, who had been able to anticipate his every request, following the steps of the surgery, the shape his hands took before he articulated the need he had, who had known he always preferred the gold-tipped scalpel and exactly how long he preferred the suture to hang from the driver. The work was delicate and demanding and beneath was his desperation; his inchoate anger found an object.

“…please be more frequent with the dry lint. I should like to save him, you know,” he muttered, wishing the image of her unmarred face could somehow transpose itself to the ruin he was trying to delineate and repair.

“Yes, Dr. Foster,” she replied, dabbing at the most egregious exudates.

“I need that tenaculum now! Perhaps if you decide the boy is a Confederate, you might bestir yourself enough to help me. If he’s in butternut, maybe he won’t end up in a Green pine box, eh?” he exclaimed, hearing how she took a swift breath and handed him the instrument, how contained her voice was when she answered.

“Yes, Dr. Foster.”

Lisette had come in sometime while he was berating Emma and settled herself at the foot of the table, observing closely and sketching. The sound was not ordinarily an unpleasant one, the rasp of the pencil against the heavy page, but everything seemed to conspire against him. It was intolerable.

“Mademoiselle Beaufort, this is a surgical theater, not an atelier,” he said dismissively, expecting she would take up her things and leave with an expression that said she found him wanting, rude and selfish. She only laid down one pencil and picked up another, her wrist moving quick as a hummingbird as she captured something, her lips curved into the half-smile that meant she was satisfied with the line.

“Am I interfering? I cannot see how I trouble you,” she said evenly. Once they had worked together in a shared room, he with his lecture notes and she with her palette, but that time had passed and it was as if it had never been. Now, she was a distraction, for herself and also that she was not Mary, as Emma was not, nor Anne, a reminder that what was most necessary to him was far away. There had not been another letter from Mary and the worry of that was bile in his throat, sleep that would not come.

“That we are having this conversation, by nature, is interference,” he said, turning to tease a suture free from the man’s cheek. “Kindly take your canvas and let me attempt to recreate the shadow of the Lord’s effortless perfection before this man hemorrhages.”

He turned back to the nameless patient, thinking Lisette would take his meaning and understand she must go, but there was only the sound of her pencil rubbing on the paper, the rustle of her silk sleeve. He whirled around.

“I asked you to depart,” he said, allowing his wrath to bring out his Chesapeake accent, an echo of his father in a rage.

“You said something poetic and complicated, no? As you always liked to, for the sound of the words. You didn’t mean it,” she replied, not quite airily, but not distressed at all by his affect, ignoring his order as if he were a child. 

“Did you think I was jesting? I can assure you, mademoiselle, I was not. Miss Green took my meaning, didn’t you?” he declared.

“I couldn’t say, Doctor.”

“Seen and unheard, a joy absolute,” he remarked curtly, seeking to keep his temper in check. Mary would have chided him long since but he would only have been intrigued by the man’s case if she were assisting, if she’d been busy on the other ward, even lying in the white bed a floor above.

“No need to mock the girl for your own amusement. Your quarrel is not with her,” Lisette scolded and it was enough, the moment that made the petal drop from the bud, the strike of the flint. 

“Damn it, get out!” he shouted, throwing the gold-tipped scalpel across the room, not near enough to hit her but close enough to make all three women gasp, Emma clearly horrified, Anne and Lisette more indignant and offended.

“Nurse Mary wouldn’t allow that!” Emma cried, silent no longer.

“She’s not here!” he shouted. The response was even more marked than when he had thrown the knife, the way Emma turned her face away and Anne looked down at the dozing old officer, the way Lisette gazed at him steadily, appraisingly, her chin raised.

“Get. Out. _Vous me comprenez maintenant_?” he said, his voice flat, the French rusty but serviceable. “All of you, out. An orderly can assist me or Mr. Diggs.”

Anne looked at him in disbelief and he gestured her out as well, Emma Green having left before he’d finished his sentence, Lisette gathering her things with an overstated formality and care. He turned back to the man on the table, the man he was supposed to save when he himself was so close to the edge of losing the integrity he’d found he couldn’t do without. When the orderly came or preferably Samuel Diggs, he could cross the room to retrieve the scalpel but he already knew what he would find—the gold blade bent, imperfect, useless, a casualty and a message. He must do his best to mend the patient and then write another letter to Boston, send a telegram to Jonathan, read the Donne she had left him “He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot/ Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not,” anything to get word of Mary, to know what he could not bear unknown.


	3. “Carry all those secrets to the grave”

He thought she’d let him in. She hadn’t; he’d walked through the door she held partway open. He thought that meant she allowed it. A man like him would never understand a woman like her and because she could never change it, she’d learned how to use it—as a veil, a shield, a spear, a balm. It anointed her like myrrh. He liked that clock too much but he’d never steal it. He thought she’d be distracted by that she supposed, she supposed he styled himself the keenest eye when he had only a few tricks, flimsy like what the tinker brought round to the back door when there was a kitchen full of imported German copperware and solid iron kettles. He meant to put her in a difficult position, choosing between the family and her freedom, as if she hadn’t been in a difficult position since she’d been born breech in the caul. The Lord knew why she’d waited to cry when she was dragged from her mother and He knew when she learned to stop. She put her trust in the Lord, that’s where it was safest, and she’d never been sorry for it. That Pinkerton, she heard how he said it like he’d earned a title when it was just his daddy’s name like all children should have, that man thought there was a golden scale like Miz Green’s gilt clock, two sides that could be weighed against each other. He thought he could heap enough on one to force it to the earth. Perhaps it was that way for a man like him. Not for her.

“I love these children, sir, like they’s my own.” she said. No matter what he said, he would see the same face and he’d make of it whatever he wanted. He’d been direct and he went on that way.

“But they’re not. Not your own children, are they now?” _Now _, he said and she listened to that word first. Now they weren’t anyone’s children, no matter what Miz Jane and Mr. James wanted to tell themselves. Now they were grown and whatever was wrong in them, crooked or damaged, whatever had been left out, was how it was. Jimmy and Alice wouldn’t think to ask her a question and Emma didn’t like to. She saw their infant faces in the ones that looked past her now but it took trying.__

__Her own children—they weren’t that either. She’d never had her own baby and she’d been right for it. Mr. James hadn’t lifted a finger when her brother was sold away eleven years ago and she’d never trusted him not to sell a child, never trusted Miz Jane to argue for her or to win. She’d held Miz Jane’s babies, the ones that lived and the ones that died, and they learned her heartbeat like their mama’s but she had taken pennyroyal all the times she’d been with Obadiah even when she hadn’t wanted to. It wasn’t a matter of what she wanted more, it was what she wanted less. She wouldn’t let them take a child, so they’d taken the dream of a child. She never pretended Miz Jane’s were her own though Emma had not understood and when she was small, she’d pushed Miz Jane away when she was sick or scared. It had hurt her mother and Miz Jane had made sure Jimmy and Alice knew Belinda was not Mamma. She’d preened over it, even, as if it were an accomplishment but she was like that, Miz Jane, liked the look of things and counting up, thought she’d made her garden grow the dahlias so big, didn’t understand her Bible for all she read it, she didn’t know grace nor mercy, didn’t understand those children._ _

__“I couldn’t bear bringing no trouble on this family,” she said to the man, not even a proper Yankee officer. He’d put another burden on her back and think it light, like Mr. Lincoln’s freedom’d give wings to her feet. Like she’d have to give up the earth and take to the sky and think it a blessing._ _

__“I know that. I only want Stringfellow,” he replied. He wanted that boy Emma had fancied once, before she went back to the hospital. _Only_ , as if he didn’t ask for everything, secrets and trust and loyalty, as if she should have to give something to a stranger. He wasn’t on the road to Jericho and she wasn’t the Samaritan. She didn’t know why he bothered to ask when he’d already taken and who the woman was he thought he was fooling._ _

__“I’ll take some tea now, if you’ll join me,” he added, gesturing at the silver pot and the silk armchair with one hand. She went to pour before he could serve them both. She wouldn’t waste the cup._ _


	4. “What you call ‘the interruption’”

He made himself return to the ward after reading the letter Jonathan had sent. A letter, he reminded himself, and not a telegram, which had just barely off-set the knowledge that his friend was a restrained and unexcitable correspondent, too dry to be phlegmatic, but not given to a histrionic response to his patients’ illnesses, nor much of anything else. Of the Louvre’s treasures, he had murmured, “Yes, I see,” and of Notre Dame at sunset “most artfully done.” He had not said much of the beautiful courtesans in the salons but he had been taken, as much as he might be, with Marie-Laure’s elegant dissertation on Voltaire and had drunk his glass of Burgundy to the dregs, an uncommon event. Jed tried to resolve the content of the letter, its author and his circumstances into some balance but failing, he had done the only thing he could think of and hoped the practice of medicine would help both physician and the patient.

Miss Green was tending the man he’d operated on a few hours earlier with the utmost care; he could see it as soon as he walked in the room. Something about the way she kept her gaze focused on that bandaged face, the way she was rearranging the few necessaries on the table beside the bed suggested she too might be trying to occupy herself. He had never known her to be so exclusive in her attention, had assumed her frequent distractibility was due to her youth and the inarguable appeal of the tall, handsome chaplain, but there was a fellow sympathy today he hadn’t expected. She was troubled, very troubled, and Lord knew he’d be the last one she’d confide in. Even if he hadn’t sworn and thrown a scalpel in front of her this very forenoon, which he most certainly had. He’d heard in her voice how Emma also missed Mary, but the pain of hearing her invoked had been too much and now he wondered what he might say to the young nurse that would preserve his dignity and acknowledge his fault. Apology had never come easily to him, though his parents discovered innumerable deficits to catalog and his wife had also found him to be a disappointment, which she had made clear sotto voce, in full voice, and even tapped out in Morse. He recognized that same tone of righteous castigation in Miss Green’s responses when he approached her and thought how much she wished him punished. Perhaps if she knew how he suffered over Mary, if she understood his dilemma—but she was so young, so sheltered…

“Precisely, Miss Green. Initiative, self-reliance, hmm. Very good. You are very suddenly coming into these qualities. Our Head Nurse, Nurse Mary, she would be proud but I think not at all surprised by your…blossoming,” he said. She was startled, unused to praise for anything other than her appearance most likely and that he would mention Mary when the most recent reference to her had triggered his untoward explosion.

“Thank you, Dr. Foster. I’d like to think Nurse Mary would approve. I should attend to my patient now though,” she said. So few spoke of Mary since she had gone and it moved him strangely to hear how willing Emma was to declare she missed her as well, in the gentle tone, the image she evoked of Mary’s diligent supervision. Samuel had mentioned Mary a little as well but few others; it seemed McBurney sought to remove all trace of her and the staff was eager to comply, as if it would appease their capricious, spiteful chief. Lisette, discussing Mary in the hallway, had been the outlier, even more unusual as she had known her for the briefest time of them all, yet speaking of her with the greatest ease. He saw she was drawing again and he thought she would not welcome his interruption but that he must say something before too many more hours had passed, his offense become a relic it would take years to transform into a ruin.

“I apologize for…my behavior earlier,” he began, keeping his voice low. While it was true he was the surgeon, the erstwhile emperor of the operating theater, he should still have remained the gentleman he had been brought up to be; raising his voice, resorting to obscenity and throwing the knife had been beneath him, no matter how frustrated he was. His naturally irritable temperament had been balanced by Mary’s and he felt the lack of her comforting asperity, her insight, as well as his fear and longing for her. Lisette had stopped her hand but not laid down her pencil, the expression in her eyes at odds with her girlish coiffure, the flamboyant rose silk of her dress. She was impassive and he felt he deserved some response, that there was some justification, however small, for his actions; he had urged her to leave and she had ignored him, dismissed him, convinced she knew better. He could not help adding, “Though it _is_ customary here in America not to interrupt a surgeon during a procedure.”

“How quickly the apology is withdrawn-- you can’t abide regret, no?” Lisette replied tartly. She couldn’t know how it sounded, how the word _regret_ eclipsed the rest, how quickly Jonathan’s words from the letter returned to him,

> _“Foster, I don’t wish to alarm you unnecessarily, but the outcome is not decided. You did not make it clear what your relation was to the Baroness when you requested I supervise her care, but if it is more than collegial respect or a general compassionate pity, I urge you to consider what you will regret.”_

What he would regret, what he did—Mary in danger, beyond his reach, how he had acceded to her instruction and McBurney’s and not followed his own conscience, his own urgent heart. When he first read the letter, it had taken onnly a moment before he had found himself opening his drawers to pack a bag, collecting necessary documents from his desk when he had brushed against the Donne she had left him and heard her voice, reminding him of his duty, considered there had been no telegram or message from California and that should he arrive in Boston within a day, he could make no declaration, be nothing but another physician, perhaps not Jonathan’s equal in this regard. Would her family even allow him to see her? To be so close and to be turned away he did not think he could bear. 

“Then I am doubly sorry,” he said. Double, treble, was there any end to his guilt? Lisette and Emma he had offended, Mary abandoned—only Anne Hastings might think the better of him for his choices and what did that say?

“You singled me out, yet there were other nurses there,” Lisette went on, her pique evident, the sense that she should be given an especial deference based on their past connection though the devil within him argued, why? She had left him for another man, a richer, older, titled man and laughed at his anger as if it were petulance, unwilling to see his hurt. She had arrived like some wicked djinn at Mansion House and expected him to fall under her spell simply by giving him that piquant smile, trailing her fingers along her braided hair that lay on her shoulder to suggest the way she plaited it at night, that he had once told her he loved to see, a harbinger of the night and their bed. She wore the same fragrance, attar of roses and jasmine, heavy and voluptuous; he had discovered that first silvery evening in his room she dabbed the stopper at her throat, between her pert breasts, at wrist and elbow and even in the crease of her slender thigh. She had wanted to be singled out, then and now, and yet she argued with him over it, unwittingly invoking the woman he wanted, the other nurse who had not been there, for whose absence the whole debacle had occurred. He wanted Mary, her simpler perfume—cloves and Castile soap, iron gall ink.

“We have a history, you and I, you seek constantly to remind me of it and now you complain? There were nurses there—but you are not one of them. You don’t even bother to dress the part, your perfume… It’s all a piece of cleverness, to draw my mind to the question you pose when my focus is required elsewhere. She—I’m balanced on a knife-edge, trying to decide my future course,” he said. If Lisette had arrived, eager to be a confidant and not a temptress, how much she might have helped him! She was astute, articulate, unfettered by convention; the expression Lisette had captured in the picture of Mary told him she had been that finer self for a sick stranger, able to engender trust and a transient, powerful intimacy. But she would not be that woman for him, not again.

“You mean to say that you are uncertain about us?” Lisette said. He felt his ire rising again. To be so misunderstood, to have no one with whom he could discuss his paralysis in the face of his few, terrible choices…to see Lisette blooming and bright-eyed and to recall Mary’s eyes glassy with fever, the waxy pallor that had terrified him, that he dreamt of every night, the haunting refrain too late too late overlaid in Anne’s soprano, Mary’s anguished moan, even McBurney’s most pedantic tone, without a hint of his wilder cackle. Jed opened his mouth to make a cutting rejoinder and then just as quickly, shut it, pressed his lips together tightly to keep his fearful bitterness from pouring out. She misread it.

“It is amazing how hard you must work not to say what you mean,” she added. She was right and wrong and her words were an echo of Mary’s accusation about how he avoided whatever troubled him. He heard them both, a duet that nature would never know, only the stage within his mind. 

“You might be surprised how easy it can become, when you are accustomed to a bridle,” he said. Let her make of that what she would, a remonstrance or an explanation, a confession, an entreaty. Mary would have known it was all of those and something else—the truth disguised, the pearl still within the oyster. He gestured at Lisette’s sketchbook, in need of a respite, the face emerging from its layers of muscle and bone, the sclera somehow gleaming like a lit lamp, that way she had of catching some essential quality and confining it to the page. She was an artist—she liked nothing better than to discuss her work and that he could manage now, if little else.

“Is your subject amongst these men?”


	5. “Littered with derelicts of corsair careers”

“Drink this,” Jed said, handing Henry the crockery mug, firmly enough that the younger man didn’t protest. The past few days, there had been a general unkemptness about the chaplain, his movements slowed or abrupt and the way he set his mouth revealed more than he could imagine of the mandible beneath. “It won’t seem so terrible after, whatever it is…slowly, now, it’s a restorative, not a bludgeon,” Jed added, watching Henry bring the cup to his lips as it he would bolt the contents, whether it was scalding coffee or a tot of medicinal whiskey. It was neither and the younger man nearly smiled after the first swallow, a rare sight, that old grin he’d once shared widely when a boy woke or Matron scored a point.

“Good Lord, Jed, what is this?” Henry said, sputtering a little, then returning to take another, more cautious sip, then another he actually showed signs of savoring.

“Brandy. Cognac. Massougnes 1805,” he replied, certain that after brandy it had had no meaning to Henry but still enjoying the form, the way he had savored the fragrance after pouring it into the rude cup, a far cry from the fat bottomed glass it called for. He would have had to see the color then and been reminded of Mary’s hair in the sun and how he had once only wished to catch her en dishabille on the veranda as it dried around her. It was a dream from another time, another War. The mug had concealed all but the scent of the brandy and that he had never shared with her.

“But how did you come by it?” Henry asked, taking a longer swallow. His color was already better, a sign of his youth and hardy constitution, a reassurance; Jed had noticed a pallor that spoke of restless, sleepless nights and remorse, of meals picked over and work taken in its place. He had begun to worry about illness but Henry’s response to the liquor suggested that whatever fever sapped him was spiritual.

“Mademoiselle Beaufort is not my only friend from Paris, you know. A Monsieur Vernois, Maxime, sent that to me, months ago, and I have been saving it,” Jed replied. He hadn’t know what night he was reserving the bottle for but it seemed a remedy tonight.

“Friend? Is that what you call her?” Henry said, the brandy already working on him. He was tall and well-built, he must have eaten hardly anything to be so easily affected, the offense he took at the word obvious, his confusion less so.

“It seems the most apt word and of course, there are as many kinds of friends as flowers, even if we don’t consider the violet and the Venus fly-trap so very much alike,” Jed retorted but not with any real anger or bite. Despite the drink, the quiet of the parlor, the benevolence of the candlelight, Henry remained dejected. Jed, so familiar with its torment, recognized the man’s despair.

“Has she refused you, then?” Jed asked. He was absorbed with his own affairs, _les arrangements_ Lisette’s voice supplied, but he would have had to have been blind to miss the way Henry regarded Miss Green, how Emma looked for him in every room and how the past few days their glances had become short and painful, how often Emma let her dark lashes drop in a poor simulacrum of a coquette’s flirtation.

“No. It’s not—I haven’t asked her, I can’t, I couldn’t let her accept,” Henry said, the phrases halting. Jed wished for coffee, real coffee, properly roasted and brewed, a wonderful opalescent rainbow of oil skimming the top, a jigger of Max’s brandy added, a soothing, stimulating tonic to ease the imminent conversation, the crisis Henry faced and could not bear without breaking.

“Is it her family? Do they offend your Abolitionist sensibilities that greatly?” he suggested, suspecting it would be rejected but how sharply, how quickly, he couldn’t say.

“No, it’s nothing to do with them.”

“You fear she cannot be a minister’s wife, then? For I think she would surprise you. Miss Green has…unexpected qualities, talents you might not expect recalling how she was when she joined us here, all missish airs and graces,” Jed offered.

“She has surprised me. But it’s not that, it’s something else altogether,” Henry said and Jed waited for him to continue, noting the way the chaplain had let go of the brandy and had clasped his hands until the knuckles were white. “I’m not fit, not for her, not for any woman.”

“Hopkins, I know you’re a Congregationalist but perhaps these months working beside the nuns has given you a certain affinity for the Papists—do you seek to make confession? Absolution? I shan’t make a very convincing priest, but I’ve done worse,” Jed replied. Henry was such a good man; whatever troubled him had knocked him from the lofty heights he occupied and he had a long way to fall.

“There are things a man does he can’t speak of, there aren’t words,” Henry said.

“But there are nightmares, aren’t there? So many you forget what it is to sleep, what that ever meant,” Jed said seriously, letting his own memory of such nights into his voice. 

“Yes,” Henry said but bleakly. It must have been that battlefield excursion. Even after the young Confederate had destroyed himself, Henry had not sounded as hopeless. 

“I know the nuns are fond of their rituals, but I’ve never thought prayer needed to be entirely articulated. God is omniscient, omnipotent—surely He can understand what you cannot say,” Jed tried, seeking to match the treatment to the wound. He enjoyed theological argument as much as the next intellectual, but what Henry required, the confidence of belief, the unfaltering faith that Mary carried with her like a bell, Miss Gibson like a diadem worn with her plain head-wrap, Jed himself had little enough of, but enough to share.

“I don’t think—if even I don’t know what I think, how could He?” Henry asked, adding, “And if He does, He cannot…”

“Hopkins, do you hear yourself? This is your pride speaking, questioning what God is capable of, deciding how you will be judged. That is for Him alone. I haven’t the faintest idea what it is you’ve done or said, but you may be forgiven for it,” Jed said firmly, allowing himself the lie to give the man some ease; he knew Henry well enough to suspect there’d been some violence, probably to do with his mission of mercy—nothing else made sense. The younger man had wanted a taste of the War and was choking on it. 

“I don’t see how,” Henry muttered.

“Well, that’s not necessary, is it? I propose what is necessary is how you will forgive yourself, how you will accept whatever it is,” Jed remarked. 

“If you knew what I did, you wouldn’t say that,” Henry replied.

“Do you think goodness is perfection? That this hospital isn’t filled with men who are convinced they have sinned beyond redemption, a dozen ways since they took up arms? I have seem you console them. There are so many ways to fail our better selves—and yet, to regain them, we are given a simple answer. Faith and work,” Jed said, thinking of the needle’s persistent lure, the vitriol in his mother’s voice, Mary’s heart-breaking, delirious question about whether he would be waiting for her when he knew he would not and what he had to do to get up every morning, to treat the boys and lift the pen to write to Boston.

“It is yourself you have lost faith in, not God,” Jed added. Mary had said that once, a night when he railed and retched bile, and the truth of it had startled him away from the pain that beset him. Now Henry looked at him and he thought his expression must have been similar. 

“Shall I take up your scalpel then, since you are so clearly ready to become this hospital’s chaplain in my stead?” Henry asked. He still appeared exhausted and sad but some light had returned to him and so Jed allowed himself a grin at the attempt at humor.

“I think the men would get tired of Psalm 91—it’s the only one I ever learnt by heart. Let us keep to our spheres except as they overlap in friendship. The War has taught me that at least, the value of true amity,” Jed said, rising from his chair, laying a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “Finish the brandy, it’s too fine to waste and then try to get some rest. ‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty./ I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust…’”


	6. 6.	“I’ve seen the alien ships of destiny”

He would think she had come on a whim but it wasn’t so. She had not decided until she came across the drawing of his hands; it was the third sign and she had accepted it then. The drawing was not her work, it was Michel’s and she had not been able to conceal how envious she had been of his ability, how he had dashed the sketch off while they sat waiting for the girl to bring the wine, Jed’s impatience and his American impulse to industry caught by her rival’s pencil. Jed had patted her knee gently to soothe her and Michou had given the drawing to her with a flourish, an elaborate bow that matched his bohemian affectations and she’d taken it, wishing she could bring herself to discard it but recognizing the talent and the token he had given her of her lover. She had studied it and resolved to have Jed sit for her so she might better it, but Jed made a poor model and she hadn’t then perfected the skill of drawing a fidgety, moving subject; after a few attempts that had either devolved into a fractious argument or enthusiastic love-making, she had given up and simply kept Michel’s picture as an inspiration, a comfort and a goad. She hadn’t seen it for over two years, but it fell from a loosely tied portfolio the day after she’d been at a dinner party with Maxime, who mentioned that Jed, _notre vieux copain, n’est-ce pas, cherie_ , had shocked him with his last letter detailing his commission with the Union Army, his surgical exploits and his humble request for a case of properly made scalpels and retractors to be privately paid for from his own ever-capacious pocketbook. Max had hooted in a way she’d never found attractive and said he could not imagine Foster taking orders from anyone, let alone a Virginian, and she’d said something cutting that had ended that line of discussion. It had been the same week Bertrand had offered her the chance to illustrate Charlot’s book but explained she would have to include some sketches of unusual wounds or atypical approaches. He’d said it was a shame she could not travel to America and see some of the men fallen in battle there, to make something constructive of their escalating savagery. She’d known, after she saw Jed’s hands again in Michel’s bold ink, what she was meant to do and she had begun packing without delay.

She had not thought during her voyage that the three years would have changed him so much. It had seemed ideal, the length just sufficient to have transformed nostalgia into the most potent aphrodisiac. He had left her when she told him about the Comte, all indignant fury, dear but also a bit tiresome and she hadn’t had the least inclination to beg him to reconsider or stay. His marriage she had anticipated in a general fashion—he had asked her, lightly and solemnly in turn, to become his wife and she supposed he would have stubbornly determined to embark upon marriage with someone suitable, if he could not have her; he’d made it clear she would not be considered suitable but that he had not cared for that, as if it were a peerless inducement to wed him and become, by American law, his chattel. She did not think she would be taking on much of a challenge, reading between the lines of the letter he had sent Maxime and even a marriage would not trouble her greatly. She had not known what the War would have done to him and she could not have imagined Mary von Olnhausen.

She had had her suspicions when the sick woman, her delirium lightened if not lifted entirely, had spoken of the surgeon she loved but had told herself Jed was not the only physician at the hospital. She had liked Mary immediately as was her way and she had pitied her; she had not wanted to think she might be a rival or the loser in any context for Jedediah’s affections and so she had pushed the feeling aside though not away. She could not avoid the realization when Mary asked her, in a strained, low voice that spoke of her distress and weakness, to give the drawing to Dr. Foster. Lisette had not been able to resist inquiring if there was to be a message delivered with the picture and had not known quite what to make of Mary’s response “No, he will understand, I’ve seen to that.” What Mary felt, Lisette could sense but Jed’s attachment had remained to be seen and she had reassured herself with that, that he might only be fond of the woman or embarrassed by her inappropriate overtures. The confirmation of his marriage to a wife who had put a continent between them was of minor importance in comparison and she had observed him closely to try and divine what there was between the Executive Officer and the Head Nurse, the plantation owner’s son and the widowed Baroness. He had not been happy to see her but his response was not simple, his attempts at banter undercut with fury, a dark, violent frustration she had not remembered and a corrosive guilt; she thought she sensed his latent attraction to her but he was fighting it. Or perhaps that was only her desire, that his was strong enough to require a fight

After his half-hearted apology in the ward, after he had thrown her out of his operating room, she had decided it would not do, any more delay. She would find him alone and make an overture that was explicit and undeniable; her work absorbed her, but she would not stay much longer if there was to be nothing between them. She worked on the drawing of the injured man and thought of what she had said, “That is the hope.” On the ship, she would have imagined the words holding a double meaning he could easily grasp, eliciting his soft, secret smile; in the moment, there had been nothing of that. She would try again and see and had let the hope of a reunion fill her heart.

He granted admission to his room without a delay. It was apparent from the disarray on his desk, the papers and books scattered over his counterpane. It was possible that soon enough those items would be pushed to the bare floor or crushed beneath her, that she would laugh at his impatience when she pushed him off her to pull a volume from where the spine caught her lower back, before she drew him back down to her, her compliant captive.

“I was thinking about the night we met,” she began, willing him to join her in the memory which was all beauty and allure, distant from this plain room, the dusty roads without and the people of the streets grim-faced, bandaged men, drunk men, Africans in tattered clothes.

“Dinner at Les Ambassadeurs, walking the Seine, vowing to cross every bridge before sunrise,” he answered and she heard in his tone how he had once been that adventurous, romantic man, so at odds with the dull medical men she had known, the few brash, crude Americans. He had bought her a nosegay of half-wilted violets and had not let go of her hand after she tucked them into her sash. The flowers had stained her bodice after their embrace and it had taken an hour to scrub the silk free of the petals’ imprimatur but she had relived the feel of his arms, his mouth ardent and hot upon hers, the contrast with the cool dawn wind and had been sad to see the silk return to itself.

“How familiar we felt…And yet hours before, you were unknown to me,” she added. She had almost refused to attend, refused to be introduced, to be handed a glass of wine by the man who had honestly declared that he had no idea of its provenance, was hardly a connoisseur of the whiskeys more favored in his home country. She had had an intuition about him as soon as he spoke, drawn to his voice, those dark, curious eyes, his nearly arrogant brilliance and his easy laughter. She leaned closer to him now. He could touch her if he wanted. “It was…”

“Unique,” he finished. _Incomparable_ he might have said or _wonderful_ , _miraculous_. But he had chosen the word that only said that their encounter, their attachment had stood alone, that relegated it to a past she wished to make present and future.

“I am sorry I did not appreciate it then,” she offered. It was not all she offered and he began to see it but the despair that had been in his eyes when she was bid entry had not changed. She knew what she meant but not what he heard. She had chided him for his inability to tolerate regret and now she wondered what he had thought of, or whom, when she had said it. She wondered because she did not want to know, even as she recalled the haunting timbre of Mary’s voice as she had said “Did you love yours?”

“Is that a confession or an apology?” he said. A smart retort, not delivered with any scathing wit or glee at catching her out. A question she couldn’t answer, wouldn’t.

“Which would you prefer?” she said, suddenly needing to feel his answer upon her body; words would not do. He would return her kiss, a hand upon her face, at her waist, his sigh on her tongue like her favorite Bordeaux, or he would push her away, his gaze fixed somewhere else—the doorframe, the ruddy vines on the wallpaper, a woman’s pale face in a fitful sleep.

He parted his lips—she saw the shape of his kiss, the shape of “No, Lisette, _non! _” and the door opened as the knock rang out. There was relief in his eyes and a sadness she had not let herself acknowledge. Jed gave her the briefest nod and walked to the orderly’s side. She shifted and glanced at the empty bed. There it was, her drawing, Mary in his bed. It was a sign as the other had been, her work now finer that Michel’s had ever become.__


	7. “I’ve been carrying it around all day”

It might say he was grievously wounded. It might and that was the foolish hope Anne allowed herself for a moment before she had to read the truth, the words spare, direct and incontrovertible. They did not seem words that could ever belong to Declan Brannan, that charming, lovely man with his charming, lovely, knowing hands and she found herself aware she could not read them to his mother. She still was unsure what the night had meant to him, if she had been only a ripe piece, a diversion in the face of the death he’d seen coming towards him, an unsuccessful ploy in securing a deferment that no one—not Anne herself, his mother, not even Declan, for all his glib talk, had truly done very much about. Had it been honor or fatalism that kept him from wheedling more effectively? She knew everything about him, the strength of his broad back, those hands, the sturdiness of his thighs between her own and those laughing eyes, and nothing at all. Why he had enlisted, how he’d found his way to his mother’s side before the battle, whether he preferred whiskey or gin. What song he sang to himself when he washed, when he was drunk, if he would say a prayer before dying as he had before he spent, a prayer and blessing on them both. She’d enjoyed him, enjoyed his attentions and his skill, enjoyed being praised for the silky skin of her belly, the prettiest pair of diddies the Lord had ever made, enjoyed the holy blessing he’d given them both for their immoral coupling. He was a change and a respite and he hadn’t made many demands of her, other than to let him unlace her stays. He’d coaxed her to her pleasure as Byron never bothered to do and the slap he gave to her bottom was paired with a proud grin, had made her be again the saucy girl she once was. He was boyish but unequivocally a man, with a man’s predilections and flaws, except that he’d come back to be Bridie Brannan’s boy just one more day. Anne had not seen him leave Mansion House. What she remembered was being woken by him and convinced not to mind the clock, acushla, the kiss he’d blown her as he finished securing the last button of his coat and she struggled to tie her garters, his apology that he couldn’t stay to help her with them. She had nothing to say to comfort his mother, who would shortly be transformed from a stone monument into something Anne knew was not for her to see. Grief was not that variable but it was particular, she’d learned that, and alcohol made a poor anesthetic. She took a deep breath and began.

“Dear madam, it is with great sympathy I must report the death of your beloved son Lieutenant Declan Brannan, who fell heroically after leading his men into battle. Surely no words can assuage your grief…” she said, pausing as if she read and did not write, an exercise which was not unfamiliar. She often wondered if Byron could read at all, given how often and how successfully she had deployed the trick and there had been letters that arrived she knew she could not read to the soldier on the bed and expect him to survive it, that she had amended, elaborated on, and then conveniently lost or misplaced until it could be borne. Bridget was dry-eyed yet and listened.

“…Yet I pray some solace may be found in the thanks of his fellow soldiers and of the republic he died to save,” Anne continued. The Bible or Tennyson or Longfellow to close? Nothing Papist, though it would have consoled—the commanding officer would never had written anything that smacked of Rome, no matter how much he had esteemed his lieutenant.

“Annie. I know my son. Give me the truth. Only that. Please,” Bridget interrupted. She said it as if it were simple but they both knew it could never be. The truth—that one more man had died, the circumstances making no difference, that Declan would never walk through a door again, whistling or reeking of liquor, that neither of them had done anything to prevent it and that their sacrifice would be longer and harder than his but still less. Bridget could not be consoled, not by this letter, nor any words Anne might say, any praise or small memory Bridget could not have known; there would be only time and prayer, work and God’s grace. The last seemed in short supply, when it was wanted most.

“Madam, I regret to inform you your son, Lieutenant Declan Brannan, has been killed in the line of duty,” Anne read. Bridget had been expecting it but it was blow to hear it, that was apparent. The older woman wrapped one arm around her waist, where once she’d carried him, and extended the other. Her tremor was fine but unmistakable.

“I need your flask. Now,” she said. It wasn’t a demand, it was the cry of a soul in torment but Anne was taken aback and didn’t move. Bridget must have thought it a refusal.

“I’m matron of this hospital, I see everything that happens here. For the love of all that is holy, Annie, give me that flask,” Bridget added and the bottle was in her hand before she had finished speaking. Anne felt relief to watch her tip it to her lips and swallow, the raw liquor the only immediate treatment available. The action created a distance between them, space enough to see Declan had had the same eyes, she saw now, the shape of the lid and the hazel so dark it was nearly gray. Bridget wiped her mouth, the way the meanest drunk would do, half-collapsed outside the pub, and ignored the tears that ran down her face. She spoke again.

“Now leave,” Bridget said and Anne did the only thing she could and walked out of the room. Bridget would live and that was bad enough.


	8. “Your ma will miss you”

Oh, she was the prettiest young thing, was Miss Emma Green! It was nothing at all to understand why the chaplain broke his heart over her and why Nurse Mary had taken her under her calico wing, why Anne Hastings gave her a sidelong glance, more suspicion than anything else except for the rare times when the girl touched something in the brash Englishwoman and reminded her of Kentish hop-flowers and hedgerows and larks. Bridget had drunk Nan’s flask to the dregs, needing all the gin to make the pain of Declan’s death wait for her somewhere else, like a visitor she had placed in the parlor, and she’d been singing the old songs from the old country for the past hour, remembering what it had looked like when four scrubbed faces peered up at her from their bed, calling “Again, Mam, again!” as they jostled about until the littlest settled back on his pillow, Jacky who’d been taken by the cholera in ’51, who’d thought Declan and Michael and Pat had hung the stars. He’d gone first and she’d grieved hard but it hadn’t been like this. How this would be when she let it, when the gin went and the charming girl in front of her with her carpetbag and earnest brow. She hummed the last bar and looked at her hands, unsure when she’d gotten so old.

“And what do you need, Miss Green, this time o’ night?” Her body was heavy on the bench and it was a labor to raise it up, her soul at her shoulders, grasping the muscle and bone. She let her eyes rest on the girl, waiting for her elaborate dancing words.

“I would like a room.” The room had no corners, the floorboards beneath their feet ready to fly away like the enchanted carpet of the tale Declan had loved best; a day that was senseless, she insensible. There had been no politesse, only an unadorned request, a demand Emma made so that it would not occur to anyone to reject her.

“You already have a room, in your very large, very comfortable house, Miss Green. With your family, as ‘tis proper,” she said. The words were not slurred and it seemed the gin made a poor warden, the grief sidling up to the closed door, turning the glass knob…

“Here. I’d like a room here. Anything will do for me. This is where I belong. Matron, please,” Emma replied. There was no hint of a romantic motive in the girl; she was wearing the same dress she’d worked in the day through and she looked straight ahead, not trying to catch sight of the tall Chaplain walking through the wards, too tired to rest easy. Since they’d come back from Ayres’ farm, there’d been a coolness and now the girl’s dark blue eyes were like all the midnights Bridget would face, knowing she hadn’t lifted a finger to save her own boy, her only boy, her last love.

“Seems I can arrange it. You’re in luck,” she said, noting the way that pretty mouth turned hard, how she bit her lower lip before she repeated it.

“In luck. I suppose that’s so. I am very tired, Matron. Do you think you might show me?” Emma said. Bridget beckoned her to follow and they climbed the stairs.

“You might take Nurse Mary’s old room. Cleaned it m’self and I could find you some fresh linens for the bed. Not as fine as you’re used to, for certain, but it’s what’s on offer,” she said. She could still see the sick woman in the bed, the way her dark hair had been wild around her and yet she never lost that intrinsic Yankee modesty, even when the wet nightdress clung to her breasts and belly, gaped at the neck, when she cried for her lovers, the dead and the living. Bridget had left the chipped jug on the bureau, where Mary had kept some little flower if she could, but all the other things that had been left behind had been parceled out—the books to Dr. Foster, the laundered handkerchiefs to Miss Jenkins for the contraband. Bridget had a few of her hairpins in a dish, though they were less taxed by her own greying mane than the heavy curls she’d braided and restrained until she could not.

“Oh, Matron. This is…just what I wanted. I know I may have to give it up sometimes, if there are visitors, and sleep with the nuns, but I shan’t mind at all. It still has…something of her about it, hasn’t it?” Emma said softly, setting her carpetbag done as if it weighed her down though its sides were drawn. She hadn’t brought so much with her, but she’d have to make do.

“It may. She’d a sweet spirit, Nurse Mary, and maybe it lingers. Those dearest to us…do,” Bridget said. Would her boys visit her at night? Would it be enough to have this girl here in their place? She’d never had a daughter.

“Your ma will miss you,” she added. Emma wanted to keep her face impassive, Bridget saw that, just as she saw the pain and the anger that the pretty little miss hadn’t been able to conceal. “‘Tis hard to lose a child, any which way. You mind that,” she said and finally she sounded drunk and the girl’s eyes, such a beautiful blue, the Chaplain’s torment, showed she’d understood. She was woman enough not to say anything, only to nod and walk toward the bare bed.


	9. “My faith props the tomorrows, for I know”

God came back to her in the school-room. Charlotte supposed He would say He’d never left her but she wouldn’t argue the point. She had been arguing her whole life and meant to go on that way, but it would be restful to make an allowance, whether it was for herself or the Lord. She had run the whole way North without feeling Him at her heels, drawn over her like the night which was all she had instead of a blanket and she knew from listening since she was a little girl that His absence from her set her apart. She sang the same songs, recited the same verses, bent her head in prayer but it had all been form without substance. She’d suffered over it until other suffering took its place and she decided it didn’t matter if she was the one who was blind or the rest of them; it was a question for a freedwoman among free people and she could answer it then.

She hadn’t expected she could make much progress on that score, not since the new chief had come and begun destroying whatever he could. She knew men like him and kept out of the way; he would come for her later, when he had made a mess of the hospital and he did. She’d expected the contraband, the sick and dying, the women heavy with babies who ought to be born free, all of them would be expelled, to the Carolinas or Hell, it would make no difference to him, Union officer or not. She’d be lucky to secure one wagon for the weakest and hope there would be Quakers to be met along the way. Her resources in Alexandria were limited. She had a letter from Mary she hadn’t mentioned to Samuel, but it was brief and had told her little she hadn’t already known,

> _“…Samuel Diggs will be your greatest help as he has always been mine but I think Dr. Foster will prove himself an ally, I hope so. You might apply to our chaplain, Mr. Hopkins, an Abolitionist who is given to a subtle, persistent diplomacy, accorded the respect of all. I am dreadfully sorry I have failed you, that I have not been able to be your assistant as I had wished, that I have not been able to be a friend, but there are those here who might…”_

She’d kept the letter for its honesty and the clear effort the sick woman had made to write it, the penmanship shaky, blotted, still addressed formally to _My esteemed colleague_ , signed, _With the greatest admiration, Baroness Mary von Olnhausen_ ; she’d never seen anything like it from a white woman. She liked Mary more in her absence and had begun to rue her loss sincerely when Major McBurney closed the school and she’d hadn’t had Mary as her champion or McBurney’s goad. Charlotte had railed at Samuel because there was no one else to listen and at the empty sky when it seemed most of the contraband slept-- not all, but enough of them to give the illusion of solitude. An elderly man had seen her one night, remarking, “He might hear you better if you spoke up, missy,” and she’d nodded and tried to find a place alone to seethe, faithlessly, silent. 

Then Samuel had come with his glad news, a gospel of hope and a future, and his first smile. He gave all the credit to Foster but she thought it couldn’t all be the Maryland man’s work, hadn’t any sign of him in the whole or the particulars, and every feature of Samuel’s. He’d stayed a while after he’d made his confession, “Suppose I haven’t had much to smile about… until now,” but when he’d gone, she’d made her way to the school-room to let the news sink in. She hadn’t realized the few steps from the tent hospital to the shabby outbuilding would be the road to Damascus, but Saul hadn’t known how his errand would end either. She hadn’t been given the same treatment, no woman ever was, but she didn’t need the noonday sun to blind her or the voice of the waters to learn the truth. She felt His presence like a hand at her shoulder, her mother’s hand fixing her hair, laid her own hand upon the books left for her by the Yankee woman. She opened them and read and understood.


	10. “I have a confession.”

It had been a temptation of a sort, Lisette’s offer, “…to come in—for old time’s sake.” From the first night, their love-making had been gratifying. She could be oblique and cerebral in the salon, the studio, but in his bed, he had known he was real, desired for being Jedediah, welcomed without shame or any pretensions at a false modesty that would not have become her. He had been to a brothel in Baltimore before he left for Paris, had been with courtesans with improbably elaborate names, Eléontine and Mélimia, the delicate syllables wasted on a man accustomed to Sarah, Ruth, Ann, and he had known that whatever the degree of expertise, the women regarded him as a transaction, pleasant enough as he was clean and well-built without any…proclivities that might require forbearance, but nevertheless, a man made of coins. Lisette had made it clear his pleasure was hers and that his touch evoked genuine joy, her excitement the greatest novelty, her climax infinitely rewarding; after the first time, he found he preferred to spend after she had cried out his name, to feel her sated languor as the final inducement. They slept easily afterwards, better partners in the double bed than they made in a dance, or, as it turned out, anywhere else. 

To come to her now would have been a respite from his life, an hour’s journey to another world where his fears were so much less, his happiness comparatively pure. He had had his little agonies then about the plantation and his father’s gruff voice, whether he would achieve acclaim in Paris or be dismissed as an arrogant American with more money than intelligence, the slight when Lisette wandered to the Comte, which he had thought a tremendous wound, if not a mortal one. A simpler time, one if had been good to be reminded of, a world where fissures could be filled with gold and mended. His early confidence, so widely shared, that the War would end quickly and with little bloodshed, had proven false and there was a similar lack of certainty for his own future—the resolution with Eliza seemingly at an impasse based on her silence, though he had acceded to her many requests ultimately, in hopes she would agree to his sole demand that the marriage be dissolved immediately or as close as that state as was possible, Jonathan’s letter stoking Jed’s intrinsic apprehension about Mary’s health, how he might be received if he arrived in Boston, how he was to accomplish Samuel’s prompt admission to a medical school outside of Scotland, and always the hissing lure of the needle… A reunion, transient or otherwise, with Lisette had never figured in his calculations though given her admission, “I chose Mansion House because I knew you were here,” he had not had the heart to tell her. She said it as if it had been lightly undertaken, to choose to find him, when they both knew it had been difficult, costly in every way. He had had to give her something, since her presence had been a gift to him, again, though not in the way she supposed; she recognized something of it and had given him such a complex look, loving and disappointed, astute and blank with her reply, “Well, that’s kind of you to say, though I’m not so sure it is how you feel.”

What he felt—that was no longer for her to know. Not the truth and not who he had become in the three years, the eons and miles that distanced them from each other, the man who had handed her violets, the woman who had taken them. She thought she must decide for herself alone and she was right there but wrong about him, that he hadn’t made his own decisions. It made her feel better to say it, “You have not chosen your future course, so I must choose mine,” and he wouldn’t disabuse her of it, as she had once kept from him how little she cared for flowers, for marriage and being a wife, until she could not, throwing down the rich bouquet of roses at his feet when he shouted his proposal amid insults about the Comte. She had taught him then and now she gave him another lesson, another chance to discover himself and regain a measure of respect for his choices.

“She doesn’t need to know,” she said softly. She had always been this way, able to say things other women could never imagine; Mary would have liked it about her as he had. It had been difficult to envision the time they had spent together. He had some idea of Lisette’s perception of Mary, from the drawing and the few remarks she had made, but Mary had not mentioned Lisette in a letter and had not spoken of her during their all-too-brief farewell on the dock. He remembered her face and how ill she had been; he was measured when he replied,

“I would know.”

“No more bridges to cross then. I suspected it,” she said. Suddenly, he saw her age upon her, the hollowing of her cheeks, the years he had felt she carried too easily now apparent, refining her, consequences around her like the lamplight. 

“What happened between us, how it might have been…do not forget everything about it, Jed, do not make the same mistake,” she added, stepping from the door for a moment and reaching for something, another drawing she held out to him.

“For her. She will understand, you needn’t tell her anything other than it was the gift of the artist,” Lisette said. “I have nothing else for you, I’m afraid.”

“I’m sure you know that’s not true, but heaven forbid I dispute a lady. We have argued before when we parted. I would not do so again. I wish you a safe journey, _cherie_ , a safe journey home,” he said, forbearing to look at the sketch she meant him to see as well as Mary. Lisette smiled, stretched her hand out as if to touch his cheek, let her hand graze his instead, then shut the door.

He waited until he was in his room to examine the picture. She had drawn him standing, a three-quarters view, where he looked out the window in contemplation. She had known he thought of Mary, that was evident in the expression in his eyes, but he had never been able to see himself as she did, as Mary would. She had rendered his hands very carefully, the work exquisite, eloquent, layered. He saw what a great gift she had given him and how she had dealt with her realization, the work the product of days and nights, lost hope and acceptance and a curious blessing. Mary would explain the rest when he gave it to her, the instruction to go to her even clearer than Lisette’s words had been. He laid the picture beside its mate, Mary in her bed, and thought it was the most unusual wedding present, one that could never be displayed, from a woman who would never marry.


	11. “When midnight held the funeral of stars”

He heard the clock all the time. The ticking hovered over him in the office, as he walked the halls of the hospital, right above his head when he tried to sleep. He had not been allowed to bring the second chest, the one with his own personal linens, so he had to sleep in a bed with sheets laundered in the open air, stinking of lye and the hands of the contraband laundresses, a worn quilt whose patches had melded to one solid morass instead of his Mother’s precise Broderie perse. He should not have trusted the English nurse, but he had been tormented by Mareike then and it had been her voice that wound around him like the cannon’s smoke. He had expelled her but it hadn’t brought him the peace he had expected and he was not certain she had truly left; he still heard her calling in the night, saw her upon the stairs with her nightdress billowing around her or in the chair that stood across from his desk, her throne.

Ipson had come and gone and it must be the woman’s fault; his friend’s gold watch was gone but not with him, at it should be, a second heart upon his chest. It struck each minute and hour wherever Clayton was. He was late, too late, and too early. He could not get the time right, “the easiest thing in the world, m’boy,” old Ipson used to say and he’d nodded to show he understood. He had nodded four times for the four quarters of an hour but it hadn’t come right. It had only been the pens and the blotter then, the spines of the books aligned on the shelves, nothing with the letter A, it had been manageable. He could still attend to his studies, operate and have the man survive, take tea with the wives of his commanding officers and smile at their pretty daughters. If one had red hair, he did not have to look away.

The War—he’d thought it might help, so vast and demanding, but that had been the rankest folly, that hope. The men dropped around him like leaves, like dominoes, nine-pins; some died easy and some hard and Clayton was supposed to fix the ones that teetered on the edge when he himself was falling. The chasm was endless and dark and the women were never Beatrice. Before Mareike, there had been Sellers’s wife. She sent letters that foretold doom and the daguerreotype would not stay within the folding frame. Mareike had known he was coming, had watched him and seduced him but God sent a fever to help and he had gotten rid of her except for midnight. Hastings had murdered his old friend and tried to poison him with pastry, had not even tried to help him capture the flea that would consume him. He had shut down what the Negro woman was calling a school—he’d been able to hear her reciting but he couldn’t make out the words and she walked around with a clock to spite him. Under duress he’d agrees she might re-open it, but when Foster left and Hale was on the train to Chicago, he could easily send her away, rid the whole house of women who had never belonged there, all those demure glances, the rustle of their skirts obscuring what should be clear, their hands moving too quickly to be seen.

He’d eaten the tart and survived. It had been good but then Ipson had died. He must rid the hospital of women, even their persistent ghosts. Mareike whispered the hour in his ear. Every window reflected her dark eyes still and there was a dark-haired woman in her bed again. Again.

**Author's Note:**

> Here is the shadow episode for Season 2, Episode 5 "Unknown Soldier." My title is taken from the poem "The Unknown Soldier" by Melvin Tolson, an African-American poet (1898-1966).


End file.
